*volume 2 ebook*
i'm thankful to send you a new ebook compilation of our letters from 1/4/16 to 1/4/17 (epub, mobi). i'm thankful that around this time a year ago, i was frantically assembling an ebook of my letters because i had decided that i wanted to share my writing with more people, but that was scary after so long of not having people read things i'd written and i felt like i needed to have something concrete to give to you to get you to subscribe, to say, like, "no, don't you see, i am legit, i have value, this is a book" even though i have spent my whole "career" as a writer (if i even have one, which is arguable) rejecting the idea that because some words are bits in an RSS feed that makes them somehow less worthwhile than ones that get bought and sold and printed and shipped.
i'm thankful to have had that experience of making an ebook, even though honestly it was a huge pain in the ass (stripping out formatting, relinking links, copying and pasting and recopy and pasting) which i made huger and more painful by trying to work on it in pages on my mac at home as well as in calibre on my computer at work, which caused all sorts of hair-tearing issues. i'm thankful to know that in retrospect it probably would have been easier to do it manually, even if the specifications for ebooks are still not nearly as well documented as lots of other things you can do with technology are, but i was less confident in my command of technology then.
i'm thankful that i'm more confident now, which is something that my job, even though it's hard and stressful, has helped me with—before i got this job, i was considered "good with computers" at my old job (which meant i knew how to reset the printer when it didn't work and installed one of those apps that moves the mouse on an elderly faculty member's computer so he didn't have to keep reentering his password, which he hated), but i feel capable in a new way now (even if part of knowing more is knowing how little you know). i'm thankful that last week, i set out, as a way of learning more about node.js, to make a script that would download my tinyletter and automatically make an ebook out of it. i'm thankful that i did that over the weekend and it worked! i'm thankful that it still feels magical that you can type this thing and set this variable and out on the other end something pops out in the shape that you wanted it to pop out.
i'm thankful i'll maybe write more about that another day (and hopefully make it available to others who would like to experiment with the same thing, after a little more tweaking), but i'm thankful that tonight i just wanted to send you the book of letters that it made. i'm thankful to my co-authors esmé, l, julia, patrick, m.o., pierce, ashley, k, fsa, l, madeleine, r, julia w., kflo, klark, tj, jhe, sydney, c, helene, katelyn, moe, zilla, dana, marco, sarah, krs, jerome, s, clare, scarlett, sherry, micha, k, kw, y, chloe, mt, l, j, as well as the anonymous contributors, and i'm thankful to them and you and everyone else for reading <3
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to thank you notes: